On day of contempt vote Eric Holder skips town, heads to Disneyworld

Remember: guns don't kill people -- people kill people... this is a very significant position by the NRA.

Further, THINK about it. If that particular gun had not been available to the thugs, do you really think they would not have gotten others? The main reason we do not restrict gun ownership in the United States is because conservatives point out that criminals have easy access to guns already. So... if this gun HAD been confiscated, it would not have kept the agent from being shot.

But... you should understand how Fast & Furious actually worked before spewing. Here is the main synopisis:

Arizona laws prevent the federal government (ATF) from confiscating weapons during most raids. That's right -- state laws make it illegal for the ATF to actually take the weapons from criminals.

So... Fast & Furious was designed to *track* the guns they could not confiscate: since they could not legally take the guns, the ATF figured they could do research on where the guns went.

Some agent screwed up once, and let some guns go that *could* have been confiscated. This happened once, by mistake. It was not by plan -- in fact, the plan had always been to confiscate when possible. Research by conservative journalists has indicated this happened exactly once.

Guns from that mistake did get away, were they were purchased/stolen, etc. and ended up in the hands of the criminals who killed the agent.

But again, if those guns had been confiscated, the criminals would have acquired guns another way, and the agent would still have been shot.

The REAL HYPOCRITES here are the NRA, who have denied any involvement in this fiasco, and who have pushed the contempt vote along, even knowing that Holder and Fast & Furious were not to blame for the agent's death. The ones to blame were the Arizona legislature for their laws protecting criminals who own stashes of guns... and the lobbies who pushed them to pass the legislation.

Many of the republicans who voted for contempt knew that Holder and F&F were not to blame but pushed it anyways, to score political points. That is pretty rotten, too -- but not really worse than democrats have done in similar situations. In America, that is politics as usual.

But an agent died, and the really bad part of this is that instead of focusing on the REAL reason for it (lax laws), the republicans are focusing on Holder. This is brilliant strategy by the NRA, who would lose big time if the country started really noticing. But even though mainstream media picked up the conservative research exonerating F&F, the country as a whole doesn't care. And conservative bloggers don't like research that contradicts their positions, so they don't care about the facts, either.

It is ironic that conservatives are slamming a conservative magazine because it wrote uncomfortable truths. But not surprising (and probably no different that what liberals might do in a similar situation).

I'm not mad. And I got my information from a very reliable CONSERVATIVE news magazine that did extensive interviews and research. They concluded that the hype about F&F is wrong.

I'm sorry if the facts this magazine uncovered don't fit into what you had heard was true. I wouldn't be surprised if you dismissed the Fortune article -- many conservatives have criticized it for using facts to defend Fast and Furious -- but it would be hard for you to really justify that position.

The article is based on large amounts of data. It concludes that of the two cases were the ATF supposedly encouraged guns to go into the hands of criminals, one was false (the primary witness gave two completely contradictory accounts of what happened, but the secondary witnesses all corroborate the actions of the ATF), and the other did not actually occur (it was a phone conversation encouraging a single sale -- because the ATF believed they could bust the criminal later -- and no sale ultimately occurred).

I do not expect you to believe me. I do not expect you to even read the article. You will claim I am either spinning BS or ignoring the truth.

The truth is this: the ATF ran a program, F&F, very similar to one run under Bush II. The program embarrassed the NRA. One of the tagged guns ended up in the hands of thugs who murdered a federal agent. And there is no evidence that the tagged guns could have been stopped at the border, though the republicans in Congress got very upset.

If you read the committee reports, though, you will discover that they do not claim or even believe that Holder authorized, knew, or was involved in anything illegal. This is from their own reports. Nobody in Washington believes that Holder did anything illegal.

Why do you? Do you have more evidence than they do?